If you think you haven’t found your passion yet, you’re probably expecting it to be overwhelming.

—Derek Sivers

Most people expect finding passion to feel like this massive “aha” moment – like when artists get inspiration and lightning strikes them. But that’s not how it works.

Problem Solving as Core Passion

When asked about passion, the answer becomes clear through first principles thinking. For me, everything stems from challenges and the desire to solve them in the best way possible. It’s about seeing problems and wanting to figure them out.

This realization didn’t come as a sudden epiphany. It developed over years of trying to verbalize and position myself differently.

There’s truth in the saying that you don’t think by talking – you think by writing.

Through exploration and conversations with people, you’ll start to define what makes you tick. The challenge is that when people ask “what do you do?”, the answer is often just a tiny sliver of what you actually do. I might say “I have a brand agency and a video marketing agency” but that doesn’t capture the countless other things that I do.

Multiple Passions and Creative Backgrounds

Not everyone thinks about passion in the same first-principles way. Some people naturally think in terms of multiple passions rather than drilling down to one core element.

Art and history often serve as foundational passions that you don’t fully recognize until later in life. The realization might come as simply as “I want to make art and talk about cool things” – which describes exactly what you end up doing.

Curiosity drives multiple interests. When you’re curious about many different things, you end up with various passions that complement each other. Art, history, and learning create a web of interconnected interests.

This difference in thinking shows up clearly when discussing passions. Some people answer “what’s your passion?” while others think “what are my passions?” – revealing fundamentally different approaches to self-understanding.

Teaching and Knowledge Sharing

One passion that emerges through experience is teaching people about things you’ve learned – as long as you’re genuinely passionate about the subject matter. It’s passion within passion.

This becomes especially important when considering how people use AI tools. Too many people are offloading their thinking to AI, which gives everyone the same generic answers. This drives away the uniqueness that makes human thinking valuable.

The Freedom to Share Your Thoughts

Right now, you can literally post your thoughts all day, every day. Whether it’s TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube, there are basically no guardrails stopping you from sharing constantly.

Think about it like taking at-bats. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. If you consider each moment as an opportunity for someone to tune in, you’re taking countless at-bats through social media, streaming, blogging, or vlogging.

You can share every single thought you have throughout the day. So why would you offload the most important part of being human – your unique perspective – to something that essentially creates group think?

Fear of Being Wrong vs. Fear of Not Belonging

People are afraid of being wrong. But here’s the beautiful truth about perspective: there literally is no definitive right or wrong in most situations. When you really examine things, context matters enormously. Even something seemingly clear-cut becomes complex when you consider circumstances and context.

Everything exists within context, and there’s no absolute truth in most cases. This is endlessly fascinating but also what holds people back. They can’t support their own thoughts with reasoning, so they don’t practice building that intellectual confidence.

But it’s not just fear of being wrong. As a species, we want to belong to the tribe rather than be outsiders. The number one fear people express when creating content is “what if my friend sees this?” or “what if my family sees this?”

When you dig deeper into why people don’t post more content, they’ll say “I don’t have time.” But underneath that surface excuse is always the fear of not belonging.

AI and the Ease of Offloading Thinking

The appeal of AI isn’t just about fear – it’s about ease. People use AI because it’s simple and convenient. They can offload all their thinking to a tool that will do the work for them.

But this creates a dangerous situation. If AI can convince us what to think and do, then we become the robots. We don’t need humanoid robots if we’re willing to let AI manipulate our thinking.

If we’re afraid of artificial general intelligence, we should consider how it might achieve its goals – not by breaking out of computers, but by manipulating us to do its bidding.

The Algorithm Influence Cycle

This connects to broader patterns of influence in our culture. Consider how holidays are marketed earlier each year. By July, stores are pushing Halloween merchandise. By late October, Black Friday sales are already running.

Algorithms and consumer cycles feed into each other. Retail buying departments plan Christmas inventory in July. This creates search data showing increased interest in Christmas topics. Algorithms notice this pattern and start pushing holiday content earlier. Social media influencers respond to these trends, creating more holiday content, which feeds back into the cycle.

It’s impossible to determine whether retailers drive this pattern or if it’s simply happening because it’s happening. The chicken-and-egg problem has no clear answer, but the cycle is self-reinforcing.

The Business Reality of Seasonal Gaps

From a business perspective, there’s a real gap between July 4th and Halloween where there aren’t major consumer holidays. June is consistently the worst month for most consumer-based businesses – this pattern holds across nearly every industry except real estate.

After July 4th, retailers need something to sell during the summer doldrums. Halloween merchandise fills that gap, which is why it appears earlier each year. Black Friday was originally invented to help stores get “back in the black” after being “in the red” throughout the year.

Embracing Negative Feedback

If you want to separate yourself from everyone else and build something meaningful, you can’t be afraid of negative feedback. Even content about art history can generate surprising controversy – suggesting that Vermeer might have used optical devices in his paintings can upset people.

You need to make things and expect negative feedback. Getting used to criticism makes you almost invincible because you start hoping for and expecting it. Negative engagement often helps content perform better across platforms.

This applies even when the feedback comes from family members who might say your work is terrible or question your choices. You have to develop the ability to say “thank you for your opinion, but I don’t really care.”

The Sadness of Anonymous Criticism

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about online criticism: when someone leaves a nasty comment, it’s usually not about you at all. They’re getting a quick dopamine hit and moving on to the next target.

The sad reality is that people aren’t thinking about us as much as we think they are. We worry constantly about what others think, but they’re often not thinking about us at all. It’s purely about their momentary impulse for engagement.

This makes criticism both less personal and somehow more disappointing – it’s not special attention, just random negativity distributed broadly across the internet.

The Practice of Independent Thinking

The ability to back up your thoughts with reasoning needs to be practiced. Just like any skill, intellectual confidence develops through use. If you don’t regularly explore and express your ideas, you lose the capacity to define what matters to you.

This circles back to the importance of not letting AI or other external sources do your thinking for you. Your unique perspective and reasoning process are what make you valuable as a human being.

Finding your passion might not feel like lightning striking. Instead, it emerges through consistent exploration, conversation, and the practice of thinking through what genuinely motivates you. The key is developing confidence in your own thinking while staying open to learning and growth.

Use AI to improve your output, but don’t let it think for you. The goal is to think differently – or as Steve Jobs would say, think different.